Question

I recently read that making a class singleton makes it impossible to mock the objects of the class, which makes it difficult to test its clients. I could not immediately understand the underlying reason. Can someone please explain what makes it impossible to mock a singleton class? Also, are there any more problems associated with making a class singleton?

Answer 1

Of course, I could write something like don’t use singleton, they are evil, use Guice/Spring/whatever but first, this wouldn’t answer your question and second, you sometimes have to deal with singleton, when using legacy code for example.

So, let’s not discuss the good or bad about singleton (there is another question for this) but let’s see how to handle them during testing. First, let’s look at a common implementation of the singleton:

public class Singleton {
    private Singleton() { }

    private static class SingletonHolder {
        private static final Singleton INSTANCE = new Singleton();
    }

    public static Singleton getInstance() {
        return SingletonHolder.INSTANCE;
    }

    public String getFoo() {
        return "bar";
    }
}

There are two testing problems here:

1. The constructor is private so we can’t extend it (and we can’t control the creation of instances in tests but, well, that’s the point of singletons).

2. The getInstance is static so it’s hard to inject a fake instead of the singleton object in the code using the singleton.

For mocking frameworks based on inheritance and polymorphism, both points are obviously big issues. If you have the control of the code, one option is to make your singleton "more testable" by adding a setter allowing to tweak the internal field as described in Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Singleton (you don’t even need a mocking framework in that case). If you don’t, modern mocking frameworks based on interception and AOP concepts allow to overcome the previously mentioned problems.

For example, Mocking Static Method Calls shows how to mock a Singleton using JMockit Expectations.

Another option would be to use PowerMock, an extension to Mockito or JMock which allows to mock stuff normally not mock-able like static, final, private or constructor methods. Also you can access the internals of a class.